The foundry industry utilizes robot manipulators in hazardous environments. Robots and robotic arms or manipulators, sometimes called articulated booms, must withstand heat, dust, vibration, and general battering of heavy industry when working in foundry environments. Due to these severe duty requirements, manipulator designs currently internalize hydraulic lines, avoid using telescoping joints, operate at higher speeds, manipulate in a large work envelope, and incorporate customized computer hardware and software to accommodate complex repetitive motions. Typically, robot manipulators are controlled from either a downloaded program initiated from a console, or through manual control via a joystick. Severe-duty manipulators incorporate various types of articulated booms to accommodate a wide range of objects. A manipulator may have a single large arm, or several highly mobile segmented arms to expand the field of operation. Robot manipulators may sometimes move objects weighing several tons, and thus incorporate high pressure hydraulic control systems. Articulated booms incorporate various types of grapples at the end or their arms to accommodate different tasks. A grapple may have a single pair of cooperative jaws, or several pair, or an odd number of jaws. In addition, jaws may be pressure sensitive, have teeth for gripping, or have shear cutting edges.
Foundry operations also utilize heavy duty impactors, sometimes referred to as knock-off hammers or thumpers. In the manufacture of iron castings, such as ductile iron castings, large iron risers are attached to critical areas of the molds to compensate for casting shrinkage during cooling. Remnant risen or gates can be removed manually with a sledge hammer, however many blows may be required to remove the gates at a high level of danger to a worker. In addition, worker training and protection is required in the manual gate removal strategy, thus making the use of labor intensive manual clean-up and de-gating of foundry castings a costly operation. The foundry industry has responded by utilizing pneumatic impactors or hammers to de-gate castings. The industry has also equipped grapples with metal shear type jaws to cut gates off castings during clean-up and sorting.
Some foundry manipulators have knock-off hammers at the end of their booms in place of a grapple. The articulated boom enables an operator to quickly manipulate the hammer into position to break-off a gate. These manipulator knock-off hammers often are used to move foundry castings into position by prodding or pushing castings. However, the Knock-off manipulators are not optimized for moving objects and are inadequate for sorting of castings after clean-up. Sighting indicia are usually provided on the impact tip where the impact rod extends out of the hammer housing to facilitate hammer aiming. An example of such a casting knock-off machine is the Action Impactor model #1060 IM, manufactured by Action Machinery Co. of Helena, Ala., USA. The model 1060 has a highly mobile boom and orientation joints to quickly move into an optimal position to knock-off a casting riser, including sighting indicia to facilitate aiming.
After a knock-off hammer de-gates a foundry casting, typically another type of manipulator will then be used to sort and move foundry pieces to a desired location. Severe duty manipulators, such as Action Manipulator model #960, manufactured by Action Machinery Co., have adaptable grapples and rapid response movement to quickly grasp and move foundry castings. Knock-off manipulators are not equipped to sort and manipulate objects and are therefore of limited specific use. Conversely, robot manipulators are not equipped to de-gate castings. Therefore, there is a great need in the industry for a robotic manipulator with a grapple that can both de-gate a casting using an impact hammer, and rapidly manipulate the de-gated casting into a desired area.